Now that I have read Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), I feel inundated by two distinct sentiments. The first is relief that COVID-19 is not nearly as bad as the Bubonic plague, especially given the state of scientific advancement. The second sentiment, however, is the extreme frustration I feel knowing that people have learned little to nothing from the history of infectious disease. If anything, human history is the story of people gleefully ignoring it.

It is worth mentioning that this text exists somewhere in the ambiguous intersection of fiction and non-fiction (this style was very ‘in’ at the time, and there is an argument to be made that it never truly went out of fashion). The book centers on one person’s account of the 1665 Great Plague of London, which still did factually eliminate one quarter of the city’s population. There is a great deal of repetition as the carnage is listed in detail, again and again.

Defoe is also undeniably bitter with the spread of misinformation surrounding the infection, as this folly leads to even more layered suffering. In chaos people are apt to cling to the voices that appear the most self-assured. Thoughtful scientific inquiry that requires admission of failure as knowledge is slowly assessed — these voices will always be drowned out by a strongman charlatan who never admits to faults or defeat, especially if there is coin to be made. Disaster capitalism is nothing new.

“…the common people, who, ignorant and stupid in their reflections as they were brutishly wicked and thoughtless before, were now lead by their fright to extremes of folly: and, as I said before, that they ran to conjurers and witches, and all sorts of deceivers, to know what should become of them (who fed their fears, and kept them always alarmed and awake on purpose to delude them and pick their pockets)…”

Amidst these unfortunate listings, the book was filled with some useful insights on how to avoid spreading the plague. These helpful hints include digging graves at least 6 feet underground, identifying that body removers were in fact likely to develop the disease, those who isolated tended to survive, and the fact that incubation periods exist. The later was a hard concept for people to grasp, as they could still spread infections well before the ‘tokens,’ or gangrene spots, appeared spelling the writing on the wall.

Still, even though there was a direct positive correlation between coming into contact with the infected, the public’s inability to grasp the concept of the incubation period lead to widespread misinformation that then ultimately led to countless lives lost. In ignorance, people identified the infliction as the will of God, and in so doing removed from themselves the burden of responsibility. This, more than the infection itself, was perhaps the most challenge passage to process.

“…for none knows when or where or how they may have received the infection, or from whom. This I take to be the reason which makes so many people talk of the air being corrupted and infected, and that they need not be cautious of whom they converse with, for that the contagion was in the air. I have seen them in strange agitations and surprises on this account. ‘I have never come near any infected body’, says the disturbed person; ‘I have conversed with none but sound, healthy people, and yet I have gotten the distemper!’ ‘I am sure I am struck from Heaven’, says another, and he falls to the serious part. Again, the first goes on exclaiming, ‘I have come near no infection or any infected person; I am sure it is the air. We draw in death when we breathe, and therefore ’tis the hand of God; there is no withstanding it.’ And this at last made many people, being hardened to the danger, grow less concerned at it; and less cautious towards the latter end of the time, and when it was come to its height, than they were at first.”

Overall, this book is not exactly the most exciting read, but I feel it’s worth delving into if only to better understand human behavior in a plague context. The more things change, the more they stay the same. So it goes.

At least they didn't have to bear with plague-deniers "educating" themselves in online echo-chambers... ^^' otherwise it's almost absurd how similar this account is to the current pandemic. Humanity really seems to actively strive against learning from its own history. (Rtc)

https://www.insidehook.com/article/bo...


Just in case you read Portuguese (Brazilian) and you enjoy Plague Philosophy:
https://periodicos.ufsm.br/voluntas/a...

I have seen this taught as a non-fiction account of the Great Plague of 1666; it isn't.

What it actually is: a very early historical novel. (Defoe was alive, but was a small child, in 1666.) There's no reason why it shouldn't be taught in a history class (as it has the virtue of being short, among other things), but an eye-witness non-fiction account it isn't.

I guess that's credit to Defoe's ability as a novelist.

Öznel veriler baz alınarak yazılmış bir kurgu kitabı veba yılı günlüğü. Yazarın bahsettiği 1665-1666 veba salgını sırasında 5 yaşında olması bunu doğruluyor. İnternetten edindigim bazı bilgilere göre yazarken yararlandığı verileri, salgının göbeğinde bulunmuş olan amcası Henry Foe'nin salgına dair yazdığı notlarından almış. Bütün bunlar kitabında insanlığı etkileyen böylesine korkunç salgınların toplumlar üzerinde ne çeşit etkileri olduğunu derinlemesine incelemesine ve oldukça gerçekçi bir biçimde anlatmasına engel olmamış tabii ki. İçinde bulunduğumuz günlerde kitabı daha bir ilgi çekici buldum ve okumak için çok doğru bir zaman olduğunu düşünüyorum. Gerçekle kurguyu bu denli başarılı bir şekilde birleştiren başka bir kitap okumamıştım bu güne kadar.

He disfrutado mucho de la narración de estás falsas vivencias, sin embargo tan verdaderas, tan bien fundadas.... Porque Daniel de Defoe es un novelista disfrazado de periodista que tiene alma de crítico.
Me maravilla como Defoe organiza el relato, lo funde con los datos y anécdotas significativas sobre la propia peste, las reacciones de las gentes, del gobierno y gobiernos....
Aunque la conclusión, en resumidas cuentas, es, inevitablemente llevando nosotros mismos más de un año de pandemia, que no hay nada nuevo bajo el Sol. Las mejoras en nuestra forma de afrontar una catástrofe como esta quizás estén únicamente en la velocidad con que se han buscado remedios, lo que además queda por otra parte manchado por el claro interés económico. La peste remitió en Londres a finales del 1665, y como ahora, mostró lo más generoso y lo más egoísta del ser humano, la misma entrega o ruindad... Pero no nos quedemos con lo último. Nada como los tiempos oscuros para que el Mal brille más.-

Historical fiction about the plague of London in 1665. Defoe was just a 5 year old child when it happened but documented about it in exhaustive details so it will sound like a real life journal. It is first person narrative but it does not focus on the person of H.F, a saddler that stayed to protect his business (presumed to be based on Defoe's uncle, Henry Foe that lived through it), but on general means.
There are many details about parishes affected, official decisions, the frauds deceiving people, logic assumings about the plague's spreading, occasional particular stories/anecdotes to make a general point. The narrator neutrally presents a detailed account of the situation.

I was fascinated about the bubonic plague ever since I've read Camus' The Plague. Of course, Defoe handles it entirely different, the human despair in a crisis and the candor that follows up a tragedy are mentioned with resignation because it is all flushed away soon after the refugees return. So it is obviously not Defoe's aim to point it.
The narrator is a well respected man that I sympathized with for his attitude and openness. He has medical & religious beliefs that I suppose are of the most common sense you could find those days (happily he doesn't linger over the latter). I think that the book's axis is the interest given to the poor, despite his belonging to the middle class. Because the writing is so unpolished that it reads like a report, it won't strike a chord but rather state a historical reality and force the readers into the acknowledge of a misfortunate category of people (especially in the context of the growing illuminism movement). At that time, it's likely Defoe also intentioned it to serve as a guide for the future cities struck by the disease.

-The book's structure (no chapter/headings) made it slightly difficult to read. That, cumulated with an upsetting redundance towards the end definitely reduced my enthusiasm. But that's just details.
-The foreword (for the Romanian edition) is very welcomed as it sets the book in a historic & literary context; plus, a perspective over Defoe's life and work.

It was about the Beginning of September 1664, that I, among the Rest of my Neighbours, heard in ordinary Discourse, that the Plague was return'd again in Holland...

A story of the Great Plague (in three varieties) of 1665 in London, this is done in eye-witness style, using Defoe's uncle, H.F., as the main writer/character. Defoe himself was about 5 at the time, and his family went to the countryside to wait it out, so this story here is based mainly on written sources and perhaps some family remembrances. What we get is a story of the Plague's progress, from west to east, and people's struggle against it (plus a bonus story of three guys going to the nearby countryside and spending their time waiting there, in better circumstances than many other leavers without a certain place to be). This book certainly had some influence on Camus' The Plague and Mary Shelley's The Last Man. Other books about the Plague were written already before this book came out in 1722, but this book does a very good job, even if it was first found underwhelming or just whelming by the critics.
In the appendix there is comment on the plague: how it arrived, on its varieties (all shown in the story), and what Defoe got right/wrong. Also a topographical index of places at the time of the Journal, showing the northern side of the river.

H.F. survives the Plague, and part of the story is about his endurance watching the world fall. There is some repetition, especially towards the end, but it's not irritating. H.F. walks the streets and the riverside a lot, so we get information from these journeys (even if the information originally was in other forms). The language of the story may take some getting used to: capital letters for certain words appears differently, and some words are written in way different from today's (but hardly challenging like Chaucer), fe. 'encrease' instead of 'increase'. There are some lists within the book of certain mortality numbers and such.

Like Covid, the first signs of the Plague start showing up at the end of the year before, but start seriously spreading when the spring of 1765 arrives, and is at its worst in August/September. Only in 1666's late winter does the certainty of the Plague's end arrive - and then later that year, the fire of London happens...

So I listed things as they happen: the leaving of the rich happening very quickly in spring; people being frightened or finding comfort in prophecies, signs, conmen's 'miracle preventers'; religious-level repentance, fears; how the orders and regulations appear soon (the author lists them); houses isolated yet people finding their way out of them; burial pits and body-collector carts; how it's the poor people who suffer the most, even when they get (some) charity given to them; how the trades suffer; people living on ships and boats in the middle of the river; childbirth tragedies; the carelessness of some people (some too eager to come back and thus die); some ill people going crazy and running in the streets and drowning in rivers.
It's towards the end of the plague that some other cities get it. The burial grounds are turned into other places often. The houses are cleaned, though some methods look odd now. People everywher show their gratefulness for the end of Plague quite openly. And even though H.F. here is merely a figure useful for the story, I have no doubt Defoe's real uncle was glad for things being over, too.

It does feel a bit strange to read about this Plague with what has been happening in our time, but intersting too. Some things are different, some details are still the same. The book was just the right length, and the story flowed well. The way the story ended made the book feel surprisingly uplifting, and it might give many reader some levels of hopefulness in the present. A good story.

This fictional account of the great plague hitting London in 1665 is an interesting snapshot of life at that time. With no real characters within the text (except the city itself, I guess) we get to see how far we’ve come in 350+ years but also how much we are the same. See: Stubborn leaders hiding death tolls to “prevent a panic” as well as infected people going about their day because “they don’t feel sick!” I also laughed that Defoe uses the word “trumpery” to define trinkets and miracle cures sold to the gullible to prevent illness.

One big downside is the format of the text: 240 pages with no chapter breaks, 95 footnotes to flip back to read, no dialogue, and every noun capitalized for some reason. So getting a daily page quota in is a grind. The intro in the Penguin Classics edition is sharp and the several appendices add more helpful background.

All in all I think it’s worth your time given the size. If it were 500 pages I’d probably feel differently.

Defoe lived through the plague (he was about five at the time), so Journal of the Plague Year is an interesting "firsthand experience," although probably mostly secondhand. It is a novel – actually, it is more a set of loose vignettes – but offers a description of what people during this period thought of and remembered about the plague.


The Great Plague: Scenes in the streets of London, 1665-1666 (1905). Artist: Unknown

COVID doesn't match any of the images we (I) have about the plague; thus, probably influencing our reactions to it: "I don't see danger, therefore it must not be dangerous." As of my writing of this (1/1/2021), there are more US deaths from COVID (346 thousand) than during WW1 (116,516) or WW2 (291,557). We still have fewer deaths than from the Spanish flu (675,000), which devastated the US and world. The rate of COVID spread does not make this number out of the question, even though we hope that COVID is under control here by Summer or at least the Fall.


Engraving of the Plague Doctor, Paul Fürst, c. 1656.

It was interesting reading Defoe and hearing his description of how people responded to the plague. People with plague were quarantined and locked into their homes – with their family and servants – but "in short, the shutting up of houses was in no wise to be depended upon. Neither did it answer the end at all, serving more to make the people desperate, and drive them to such extremities as that they would break out at all adventures" (p. 34). My state has a stay at home order, barring in-person seating at bars and restaurants. One of the local bars, in true libertarian style, announced that it would be open and serving for New Year's Eve. As a result, Defoe's narratives sounded familiar. Familiar and disheartening.

Of course, the Black Plague killed 25 million people in Europe, 70,000 just in London in the Great Plague of 1665-1666. It lingered for centuries, especially in cities. From that stance, we have been relatively lucky – if we are wise in how we respond in the coming months.

This edition's transplendent "Afterword" (by none other than that anti-DeFoe and scion of Joyce, Anthony Burgess) deftly analyses why this two-star reader's one-star l'il brain cell only afforded him a three-star experience of this five-star novel, viz:

There are people who still find Defoe hard to take as a novelist, and this is because they have become accustomed to regarding the novel as a form almost aggressively 'literary', full of barely concealed machinery, self-conscious fine writing, the personality of the novelist himself peeping through as a show-off puppet-master, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent.(264)

By contrast, for Mr. Foe (his aristocratic prefix was acquired by the author later in life, parthenogenetically, as it were) "the thing was more important than the word, and 'human interest' was more important than either"(269). And as far as words went, while from his plume admittedly came a whole hell of a lot of them, they were nonetheless n  

models of plain and dignified style. The audience he sought was not that which enthused over Addison and Steele [or for that matter, over Anthony Burgess]; it was still the plain dissenting tradesmen he spoke to, patriotic, shrewd, practical, philistine.

nAnd so he speaketh not to this reviewer, then, who ticks precisely none of those boxes, except most likely (given his evident distaste with this book, and as his GR-friends should surely attest) the n  very last onen.

As with Dickens's elevation of Preston/Coketown into the leading role in his Hard Times, however, what is most remarkable about Defoe's Journal is indeed, as Burgess suggests, his ability to make London "appear as a breathing, suffering entity"(274):

n  London is an emanation of ourselves, a projection of our own personalities. The individual citizens go uncharacterized, atoms which make up the collective body [...] This is in conformity with DeFoe's qualified liberalism, which means a kind of optimism. It is neither God's grace nor innate goodness which saves man's soul alive; it is rather his need for community, his concept of the desirable life as one lived collectively."n

Evidently, then, this philistine pessimist needs to re-read the Journal already!

n.b. The Oxford edition's own introduction complements this one well, as do its somewhat superior explanatory notes. It is well worth investing in both, but if you can buy just one, go with the Penguin, for the Burgess.

This is one of the stranger conglomerations I have ever encountered under the name, "novel." We’ve got a 1722 fictionalized memoir of London’s 1665 bubonic plague epidemic, how-to-survive-plagues advice and 17th-century public health info, and, my favorite part, philosophical speculation about the outbreak’s causes. It’s pretty safe to say that Defoe has an agenda in this book beyond telling tragic, bubo-filled plague stories, though he tells them very movingly indeed.

Like other pre-19th-century things I've read (here’s looking at you, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), the organization of the above pieces seems a little chaotic to modern sensibilities. There’s lots of repetition, and threads come and go unexpectedly. (One of the end notes in my edition went, "[Defoe's] narrative thus parallels the plague, becoming uncontrollable.") But this is a guy who has been credited with popularizing the novel form in English, so he’s probably still working out a few bugs. Or he’s a pre-post-structuralist genius à la Laurence Sterne. Or something in between. I will leave that to people who know a lot more about The Novel than I do to figure out.*

But enough literary stuff. Let’s get to the really good part about this book which is, of course, Defoe’s speculations about plague epidemiology** and how they relate to the history of science.

I was captivated by these speculations, particularly because of their historical context. The book was written over a century before germ theory, but is the product of a transitional time when early Enlightenment reasoning coexisted with older belief systems. Defoe did a bunch of research into surviving records from the plague period, and includes a lot of contemporary theories about the disease. He (or his narrator) seems to settle on an interesting hybrid of natural and supernatural causes of the epidemic. God does send the plague in general:

n  Doubtless the Visitation itself is a stroke from Heaven upon a City, or Country, or Nation where it falls; a Messanger of his Vengeance, and a loud Call to that Nation, or Country, or City, to Humiliation and Repentance.n

BUT natural causes can explain its course thereafter; God doesn’t make an executive decision to take out each individual victim:

Now ‘tis evident, that in the Case of an Infection, there is no apparent extraordinary occasion for supernatural Operation, but the ordinary Course of Things appears sufficiently arm’d, and made capable of all the Effects that Heaven usually directs by a Contagion. Among these Causes and Effects this of the secret Conveyance of Infection imperceptible, and unavoidable, is more than sufficient to execute the Fierceness of divine Vengeance, without putting it upon Supernaturals and Miracle.

Sure in Defoe's view, the rescue of the odd individual here and there can be ascribed to divine providence, and natural causes are ultimately divine in origin, but natural processes are a major preoccupation in the text. And it’s really amazing how many pieces of plague epidemiology, as we currently understand it, are present.

When considering potential infective agents, Defoe brings up good old miasma, bad sweat, and killer halitosis, among others, but also:

n  Others talk of infection being carried on by the air only by carrying with it vast numbers of insects and invisible creatures, who enter into the body with the breath or even at the pores with the air and there generate or emit most acute poisons or poisonous ova or eggs, which mingle themselves with the blood and so infect the body.n

Microbes!

For prevention, he records that people filled their mouths with herbs and wrote “Abracadabra” in a prophylactic pyramid, but some systematically destroyed rats and imposed quarantine measures.

Defoe also interpolates actual Bills of Mortality from 1664-1665 throughout: death counts in London organized by week and by parish. He uses pre-plague data as a kind of control in several speculations about plague prevalence and the populations most affected.

In such stew of theories and data, how to parse out what’s really happening? Well, part of what Defoe explores in the novel is how to evaluate the nature of evidence, like the place of rumors and anecdotes, and subjective influences on “hard” evidence, such as the pressure to under-attribute deaths to the plague in London’s weekly Bills of Mortality.

The pieces are here, people! Add a little inductive reasoning and the visual display of quantitative information, and you could get something like John Snow’s maps , which assisted in uncovering cholera etiology a little over a century after A Journal of the Plague Year was written.

So, yeah. Repetitious, messy, and archaically capitalized it may be, but this is a fascinating document of scientific history.

________________________
*Which would be most people, and, if it is you, I would love it if you could clue me in.

**Defoe doesn’t call it epidemiology – there’s a lot of “Distemper” and “Visitation” and “noisome Pestilence” and “Bills of Mortality” and “is it best to hide in a Hut in the Forest?” and that sort of thing. But epidemiology (in the sense of causes, spread and control of disease in populations) is what he’s getting at.